Illegal Drugs by Teresa
It was 3 a.m. on a school night and there was a knock on my dorm door. I was asleep, but the knock was so loud it woke me. I rolled over and crawled out of my bed (which was lofted at the time) and to the door. I looked around for my roommate, saw she wasn’t there and then opened the door. There were two guys standing there, in a significantly less than sober condition. Their eyes were bloodshot. I frowned and asked what they wanted and they asked where my roommate was. They then went on to explain to me that my roommate was giving them their ‘fix’ for the night and that it should be in her top drawer. They said that I could just give it to them and they’ll pay me so I can give the money to her.
I suppose it’s important to understand where I was coming from at this point. I grew up in a pretty conservative family. My mother is a guidance counselor, and my father is in sales, but he’s very involved in the church and ‘upmost morals’ were engrained into my head from a young age. BUT, I was not naive– I had had friends in high school that smoked weed and went to parties where they got drunk and did things their parents wouldn’t necessarily approve of. I was a college freshman, so the idea of drinking was foreign to me, but the idea of doing drugs and SELLING drugs was not something that sat well in my stomach.
I told them I couldn’t help them with their ‘fix’ and that my roommate was not home. I was nice but brief, and I closed and locked the door and crawled back up into my bed. The next day I knew I needed to talk to my roommate. When I spoke to her, I told her I had no place to judge what she did. If she wanted to sell drugs, I can’t stop her. BUT it was not okay with me that she was keeping them in our room and selling out of there. That was not fair to me because not only had my sleep been interrupted on a school night, but also if there were drugs found in our room, I could get in trouble even though I had nothing to do with them! This was not the first time her ‘partying’ had impacted my life negatively. There had been other nights that she would come in late with friends, intoxicated, talking and laughing loudly as I was trying to sleep. There were times where she would come back from a party ‘coming down’ from her drunkenness and she’d be upset and I’d have to talk her down. This was becoming a real problem for me, and I knew I had to talk about it.
She listened to what I had to say and we came to an agreement, and about two weeks later there had been no more knocks on the door, but her and a friend decided to get high in our room. This was against the rules, and against our agreement, so I talked to the RA.
I did care a lot about my roommate, and I didn’t WANT her to get in trouble. I never told the RA specifics that could get my roommate kicked out but I told her that my roommate was making decisions that I didn’t agree with and they were affecting me and my education negatively. I said that I did not want to get her in trouble, or file a report, but something needed to be done. So it was arranged that I would switch rooms. You know what? It sucked that I had to be the one to move even though I wasn’t the one doing illegal things, but in the end, it all worked out.
I moved in with a really awesome person who shared my values and was able to compromise on issues we didn’t agree on. I didn’t get my old roommate in trouble, and when I was moving out, I told her very honestly that I was moving out because I didn’t want to get in trouble for things that she was doing, and because our schedules did not line up. She liked being up late and partying, and I had to get up early for classes. She understood and so when I left, I did not leave with hard feelings. To this day, my old roommate and I are friends. She has stopped some of the bad things she was doing before and made school a bigger priority.
Even though this was all very difficult to go through my first semester of college and far away from home, I learned some really important lessons about trusting people and about friendship. Sometimes your friends will do things you don’t agree with, and you can’t stand in judgement. But you CAN do things to keep yourself safe and in a place where you feel comfortable.